24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
24 Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that's wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons?
24 Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!
24 Blind guides! You strain your water so you won't accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!
4 Do all these evildoers know nothing? They devour my people as though eating bread; they never call on God.
4 Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread: they have not called upon God.
4 Have those who work evil no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon God?
4 Don't they know anything, all these impostors? Don't they know they can't get away with this, Treating people like a fast-food meal over which they're too busy to pray?
4 Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge, Who eat up my people as they eat bread, And do not call upon God?
4 Will those who do evil never learn? They eat up my people like bread and wouldn't think of praying to God.
The corruption of man by nature.
This psalm is almost the same as the 14th. The scope of it is to convince us of our sins. God, by the psalmist, here shows us how bad we are, and proves this by his own certain knowledge. He speaks terror to persecutors, the worst of sinners. He speaks encouragement to God's persecuted people. How comes it that men are so bad? Because there is no fear of God before their eyes. Men's bad practices flow from their bad principles; if they profess to know God, yet in works, because in thoughts, they deny him. See the folly of sin; he is a fool, in the account of God, whose judgment we are sure is right, that harbours such corrupt thoughts. And see the fruit of sin; to what it brings men, when their hearts are hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. See also the faith of the saints, and their hope and power as to the cure of this great evil. There will come a Saviour, a great salvation, a salvation from sin. God will save his church from its enemies. He will save all believers from their own sins, that they may not be led captive by them, which will be everlasting joy to them. From this work the Redeemer had his name JESUS, for he shall save his people from their sins, Matthew 1:21.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on Matthew 23:24
Commentary on Matthew 23:13-33
(Read Matthew 23:13-33)
The scribes and Pharisees were enemies to the gospel of Christ, and therefore to the salvation of the souls of men. It is bad to keep away from Christ ourselves, but worse also to keep others from him. Yet it is no new thing for the show and form of godliness to be made a cloak to the greatest enormities. But dissembled piety will be reckoned double iniquity. They were very busy to turn souls to be of their party. Not for the glory of God and the good of souls, but that they might have the credit and advantage of making converts. Gain being their godliness, by a thousand devices they made religion give way to their worldly interests. They were very strict and precise in smaller matters of the law, but careless and loose in weightier matters. It is not the scrupling a little sin that Christ here reproves; if it be a sin, though but a gnat, it must be strained out; but the doing that, and then swallowing a camel, or, committing a greater sin. While they would seem to be godly, they were neither sober nor righteous. We are really, what we are inwardly. Outward motives may keep the outside clean, while the inside is filthy; but if the heart and spirit be made new, there will be newness of life; here we must begin with ourselves. The righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees was like the ornaments of a grave, or dressing up a dead body, only for show. The deceitfulness of sinners' hearts appears in that they go down the streams of the sins of their own day, while they fancy that they should have opposed the sins of former days. We sometimes think, if we had lived when Christ was upon earth, that we should not have despised and rejected him, as men then did; yet Christ in his Spirit, in his word, in his ministers, is still no better treated. And it is just with God to give those up to their hearts' lusts, who obstinately persist in gratifying them. Christ gives men their true characters.